Issue 16 Charles Leadbeater on innovation
Charlie Leadbeater has been billed as Tony Blair’s favourite guru and has carved out a niche advising governments and global corporations on the elusive issue of how to foster innovation. Owen McQuade interviewed Leadbeater during a recent visit to Belfast when he spoke at a conference on innovation in delivering public services.
Everything becomes shopping
Leadbeater sees the provision of public services as not so much about what service to provide but more of “what problems we want solutions for. This is because how you organise solutions might not just be a service.” He goes on to put this approach into a wider context: “Post war it was an era of ‘I need’. There wasn’t a consumer culture. Then in the mid-1960s, 1970s we staggered into the era of ‘I want’. An era which has lots of products from the US and an era you are allowed to desire and want things. We then went from the liberation of the 1960s to the consumerism of the 1980s and then in a way everything becomes shopping – museums, airports become shops and almost everything has a shop attached to it.”
The era of ‘I can’
Leadbeater believes we are entering the era of ‘I can’. This era is one: “where people are less interested in the ‘thing’ and more interested in what it does for them. What can it allow them to do? How can it change their lives? How can it enable them to possibly become a different person?” Leadbeater observes that many of today’s leading brands are ‘I can’ brands. Such brands include Nike, Google and Apple. They say to consumers: “don’t just be a consumer, do something with our product.”
Leadbeater goes on to highlight two other phrases that are now affecting consumer behaviour. This first of these is ‘I should’: “I should buy organic, fair-trade or green. This layer of ‘I should’ will get stronger and stronger for consumers and, increasingly, public policy will try and achieve some of its goals through ‘I should’, especially around health, obesity and the environment.” The final type of behavioural message Leadbeater identifies is ‘I fear’. He explains: “I fear for my security; I fear global warming; I fear that my information might get lost or stolen and you see this reflected in public services.”
Leadbeater says that most public services deal with ‘I need’ and they are increasingly trying to adapt to “the world of ‘I want’; I want it now; I want it in this form”. Public services are resorting more and more to ‘I should’ and ‘I fear’. However for Leadbeater the most interesting area, and the one with the greatest potential, is not any of these four but the area of ‘I can’. He finds this exciting: “Can you see the people you currently regard as the consumers of public services and can you shift them from being passive, complaining or demanding, into participative and contributory and sharing risk? If you can – and you can’t always do that – and you can turn users into contributors, it has dramatic effects on productivity, loyalty and the overall performance of the system.”
Engaging the user
Leadbeater now spends his time looking at such participative business models in both the private and public sectors. He goes on to say that there are two ways of thinking about public services. The first is along the lines of: “I know what I need, can you get it to me and in the form I want it in?” This is about making the public service value chain work more efficiently – “cutting out steps, joining things up, making it more responsive and consumer-friendly.” Leadbeater believes the public sector has still some way to go and lags behind the private sector by five years in this respect. He does acknowledge that the public sector is making great strides to achieve this and gives the example of Liverpool Council. He tells the story of a resident calling the council because they had a rat in their council flat. When they eventually got through they were asked if it was a rat or a mouse and a mouse had a response time of 48 hours instead of 24 hours. There was then an 11-stage process to dispatch a rat-catcher. Now council residents call a call centre that is run jointly between the council and BT. Their call is answered within 90 seconds and someone from pest control is dispatched immediately. He says that not all the problems in Liverpool were trivial – before the call centre was introduced, 50 per cent of calls from vulnerable children went unanswered. He says: “There is still some way to go and we need to think about joining up services, having better information and maybe contracting out of relevant and finding better solutions for people.”
Leadbeater’s other way of looking at public services is not to think of services as a value chain that delivers something to people. He says: “It’s not like Domino’s Pizza, where they deliver something to your door. Most [public] services involve the user, in some sense, in the production of the service.” Continuing on the food theme he uses the example of the selfservice restaurant to demonstrate how value can be released when the service process is changed and gets the user to do something different. He sees the key issues as: “Can you change the script to get people to change their behaviour? If you can engage people more you can get higher productivity.” He makes the point that if you can engage the users in the process itself you will get higher productivity. This is now the norm with many private sector services. One example being that with most courier companies the user can track their package online instead of having to phone the company – putting the user in control and saving the company money.
More in: but not much more out
Leadbeater sees this as a huge challenge for the public sector: “The story of the last 10 years, particularly in England, is that you can push much more resources into public services and you get more output. But you do not get dramatically more out. The relationship between input and output does not change very much. You do not get a shift to make it dramatically more effective and productive and in an era of more constraint on public spending this relationship will become essential.” In order to change this input/output relationship, Leadbeater advocates the more collaborative ‘I can’ approach to providing public services.
Tools not services
In order to make the ‘I can’ approach work you sometimes need to give people tools rather than services. Leadbeater gives two very good examples of this. He visited a very large facility in London that tested the blood of people who were on heart disease medication. He says: “It was the Toyota of blood testing, testing 5,000 bloods a day and delivering results back to GPs in 24 hours, very efficiently.” He then went to Germany and was surprised that the German approach was not to set up such a centre but to give each patient their own blood testing kit. This was not only more effective but also cheaper.
The other example is the dramatic reduction in the number of deaths from fires in recent years. “Is it due to a personalised fire service? No it is not. It is due to fewer people smoking, changes in building regulations and furnishing regulations and the spread of the simple smoke detector – a cheap tool anyone can install. This is the problem for the public sector. We are good at fire engines, when actually what we need more of is smoke detectors.” He continues: “This is a big problem for politicians and senior public servants when considering a problem. Often the problem requires a smoke detector and what they have is a fire engine.”
Future of public services
The way forward for Leadbeater in terms of innovation in delivering public services is extending this ‘I can’ approach beyond giving citizens tools, to getting them to participate in shaping solutions. He cites the ‘In Control’ social care pilot in England. Faced with rising demand for their services, Essex County Council faced a doubling of its social care over the next 10 years – with more elderly and more complex needs. Leadbeater outlines this experimental scheme: “Instead of an assessment and care plan run by social workers, they are provided with a way of self-assessment, checked by care professionals. They are then issued a budget – anything between £3,000 to £100,000 – and then given a plan to help them spend the money. As a result there are 3,000 people on the pilot and there will be 25,000 by the end of the year. Why the sudden increase? Because it does dramatic things. The people are healthier and more in control and more engaged with their community. The cost is generally between 10 and 45 per cent less than a traditional top down service. For less money you get better solutions that are personalised.”
agendaNi - April 2008